So Amused

Sarah Rigby

There is an unusual emphasis on ghosts in Fay Weldon’s autobiography. Early on, angels appear to her mother in the local park; a woman in white sits on the six-year-old Weldon’s bed; and ghosts unaccountably darken the rooms at her New Zealand high school (a sort of advance haunting, she now thinks, by the woman who was to be killed nearby in the murder dramatised in the film Heavenly Creatures). Later, there is the drowned pastor she sees on the pier at St Andrews; the poltergeist in Somerset that throws books at unsuspecting children; and, most disturbingly, the weeping ghost in the Saffron Walden house she shares with her mother and sister in early adulthood. This ghost’s presence is powerful: the cat seems to stare and hiss at it and when Weldon is alone with her baby one night, it so terrifies her that she is unable to leave the bedroom to get the child’s dummy, the only thing that will quieten him. Instead, she stays awake, holding the screaming baby and listening to the ghost crying through the door. When Weldon talks to her mother about this the next day, it becomes clear that she, too, feels the house is haunted. They pack and leave within hours and Weldon sells the house from a distance, without ever returning.

In retrospect, this experience seems to trouble her more than her other brushes with the otherworldly, and she analyses it at some length, half insisting, in tones of brisk bravado, that she doesn’t believe in ghosts and that it must simply have been a neurotic imagining, but also half seeking alternative explanations for what happened. It could be, she suggests, that ghosts are ‘like repeating dreams, just yourself trying to tell yourself something you’d rather not know’. Later in the book, she wonders whether the Saffron Walden ghost might have been the spirit of her sister, who was to die young, after a series of breakdowns: ‘Perhaps it was Jane we heard weeping . . . and ourselves for her.’

Discussions of this kind appear throughout the book, with an engaging lack of self-consciousness. Weldon also has an interest in recurring dreams, in premonitions, fate, tarot cards and the power of coincidence – themes that will be familiar to readers of her novels but which they might not have expected to figure so prominently in her autobiography. In fact, the book tells us more about Weldon’s views on the supernatural than it does about some of the most important events of her early life – about her father’s effective disappearance from it or the slow unravelling of her sister’s mental health.

These things are alluded to, but they are not explained in any detail. Weldon’s upbeat, conversational style allows many stories to begin as digressions, as if in passing, and then get left behind as another thought intrudes. Almost all, however, are elaborated later and it is only the obviously painful subjects that are neglected, though occasional comments about them include just enough background information to make it seem as though more has been said: as though, pages back, there must have been some vital paragraph that explained what appears to be missing.

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Letters

Sarah Rigby (LRB, 11 July) repeats the claim that Fay Weldon coined the slogan ‘Go to Work on an Egg.’ It was in fact Dorothy Sayers who thought it up. Sayers was at the time working for an advertising agency, which she used as the setting for Murder Must Advertise.

I find it hard to believe Joan Rockwell’s confident statement (Letters, 8 August) that Dorothy Sayers wrote ‘Go to Work on an Egg.’ I recall it as a postwar Egg Board slogan: much too late for Sayers. She has been credited, on the other hand, with the slogan ‘A Nice Hot Bovril is Better than a Nasty Cold.’

I too find it hard to believe that Dorothy Sayers wrote ‘Go to work on an egg’ (Letters, 8 August and Letters, 22 August). Perhaps Joan Rockwell is getting confused with Montague Egg, a character in a short story by Miss Sayers. She is, however, credited with two more famous slogans: ‘It pays to advertise’ and ‘Guinness is good for you.’

Kate Hutchinson
London E11

I think we can now take it as given that Dorothy Sayers wasn't around in advertising, or even on Earth, in the days of the Egg Marketing Board. What's striking, and also predictable, is that whenever some prominent literary figure, whether Sayers or Fay Weldon, turns out to have spent time as an advertising copywriter, authorship of one or more epochal slogans is automatically ascribed to them, as if that were the least they might have been expected to achieve during their time in an agency. My own time in advertising taught me that slogans were more likely to happen than to be deliberately thought up, as ordinary headlines lucky enough to take off.

In her book Auto da Fay, Fay Weldon is careful not to claim that she coined ‘Go to work on an egg’ (Letters, 19 September). She merely uses the phrase as the title for an account of her work on the TV script for an egg commercial. In fact, it was Francis Ogilvy, then managing director of Mather and Crowther, later Ogilvy Mather, who coined ‘Go to work on an egg.’ He showed it to Harry Ballam (creative manager), who then asked me (group head) what I thought of it. By the time Fay Weldon took over egg advertising the slogan was a given. Her job was to go to work on the egg campaign and come up with entertaining TV commercials on this theme. And she did.